Thirteen Million

We arrived in Casablanca on a Friday afternoon, my partner and me, escaping Lisbon for a weekend of sun and somewhere neither of us had been before. The decision had been spontaneous, the kind of trip you book on a Tuesday because the weather looks good and there's no real reason not to. By Saturday morning we were standing in front of the Hassan II Mosque, and I was completely unprepared for what it would do to me.

The minaret rises over two hundred meters into the sky, among the tallest religious structures in the world, and the mosque sits partly over the Atlantic on land reclaimed from the ocean to hold it. Inside, twenty-five thousand worshippers can pray at once, with another eighty thousand more in the plaza outside. What struck me first, though, was how ancient it looked, the arches and the geometry and the way the late morning light fell through the latticework, all of it whispering of something built five hundred years ago. So when our guide mentioned almost in passing that the mosque had been completed in 1993, I had to ask her to repeat it.

I am older than this building.

It was the second thing she told us that stayed with me longer. The mosque, she explained, had been built by the people of Morocco, and she didn't mean that metaphorically. King Hassan II had asked the citizens of the country to contribute, and over thirteen million Moroccans gave something toward it. Families pooled what they could, villages organized collections, contributions were tracked, certificates were issued, and the building rose from the collective offering of a nation that had been invited to make something together. She told us about her own family during the tour, an uncle who had given and a grandfather who still spoke about it decades later, and I noticed that the other guides nearby were doing the same with their groups. Everybody's uncle had a hand in it. Everybody's grandfather. A building feels old when it belongs to everyone who looks at it.

I walked out into the afternoon light thinking about ownership, not the legal kind but the felt kind, the kind that comes from having put something in even if it was a small thing a long time ago. I thought about the company I used to run and the people who still talk about it as ours even after they've left, about student projects from university that stayed alive in people's memory because they had shaped them with their own hands. The things I felt most connected to in my own life were almost always the things I had been allowed to contribute to.

And then I started to notice the reverse, which was harder to sit with. How rarely, these days, I let anyone contribute to mine.

It's so easy now to not need anyone. Amazon delivers, Google answers, ChatGPT searches, and the friction that used to require asking a friend or a neighbor has been smoothed away by software that costs me nothing. When I do receive help it's usually transactional, a service I paid for, and the exchange is clean but the connection that comes with it is thin. I am efficient. I am rarely indebted.

What I would have to give up to live differently isn't comfortable to name. The pride of self-sufficiency. The illusion that I don't really need help. The quiet defensive posture of someone who has gotten very good at handling things alone. Letting someone contribute to what I'm building means letting them shape it, which means the thing won't be exactly what I imagined, which means sharing the ownership of how it turns out.

It also means the thing will feel older than it is. Lived in. Belonging to more than just me.

The king didn't try to give his people a gift. He asked them to give one to themselves, and the asking was the gift. The contribution was the connection. The thirteen million certificates issued were thirteen million ways of saying this is yours because you made it.

I am still working out how to ask.